in Dejection near Naples_, _A Dream of the Unknown_, and many others,
Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and a more faultless
art than Byron's ever attained, though it lacks the directness and
momentum of Byron.

In Shelley's longer poems, intoxicated with the music of his own
singing, he abandons himself wholly to the guidance of his imagination,
and the verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in
_Alastor_, with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious
but bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud
"pinnacled dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the
water-falls in the Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several
thousand feet, are shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over
the valley. Very beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow
dwells in its bosom; but there is no longer any stream, nothing but an
iridescent mist. The word _ethereal_ best expresses the quality of
Shelley's genius. His poetry is full of atmospheric effects; of the
tricks which light plays with the fluid elements of water and air; of
stars, clouds, rain, dew, mist, frost, wind, the foam of seas, the
phases of the moon, the green shadows of waves, the shapes of flames,
the "golden lightning of the setting sun." Nature, in Shelley, wants
homeliness and relief. While poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an
ideal light upon the rough fields of earth, Shelley escapes into a
"moonlight-colored" realm of shadows and dreams, among whose
abstractions the heart turns cold. One bit of Wordsworth's mountain turf
is worth them all.

By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Shelley sang in
_Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_,
1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of
manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults
of exuberance and of a sensibility, which time corrects. _Hyperion_,
1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it unfinished--"a
Titanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many Miltonic
inversions in it." The subject was the displacement by Phoebus Apollo of
the ancient sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who retained his
dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the poem was begun
by Keats with a strength of conception which leads to the belief that
here was once more a really epic genius, had fate suffered it to mature.
The